Quick Tip: PowerPoint Shortcuts while EDITING for Keyboard and Mouse

Video Training Transcript for “PowerPoint Shortcuts While EDITING”

Welcome to PowerPoint. Shortcuts, while editing. 

This is Les McCarter from PowerUp training. I’ve been working with PowerPoint and giving boardroom presentations for decades and here are my favorite eight shortcuts. PowerPoints has hundreds of shortcuts, but these are the most useful ones I use that are dedicated to the editing phase of the slide deck creation process. 

So let’s get going. I love PowerPoint outline mode. It is the most important first step you should take while creating your presentation. If you’re not using outline view see the above link to my expanded outline tutorial on YouTube. Outlines let you brainstorm your ideas quickly from the keyboard, so it’s only appropriate that we can swap back and forth between the standard view and the outline view from our keyboard without reaching for the mouse. 

The command is a simple control shift-tab. The three keys on the left side of your keyboard. Watch how quickly this happens going back and forth and back and forth. Number two is the new slide trick. This works, whether you are in the outline or standard view and your selector can be on the main edit window or on the left side. 

Create a new empty slide with control M. The new slide will be right below the slide you’re working from or I’ve selected in the left side window and it will have the same matching layout. In this example is duplicating the two content layout. Shortcut number three is duplicating a slide. 

The previous example created an empty new slide but this one will create a duplicate an exact copy of the slide and the contents that are highlighted. The requirement here is that you must be in the standard view and have the slide you want to duplicate it highlighted. Then just do a control D. 

See how we now have two exact copies of the same slide Control D is for duplicate while Control-M is for new empty slide. Maybe you can remember M as in empty. Here’s a bonus tip. Duplicating an object. Same control. D works differently if you haven’t object highlighted. See how the keyboard has been clicked and selected with the circles on the corner. 

Now, I control D will duplicate that the selected keyboard object. 

Let’s do that again by highlighting the text box and doing Control D to duplicate this text box. The next shortcut is grouping objects. Each object added to PowerPoint is considered an individual object. But you may add several to create a unified illustration. Problem is that if you move one objects the other items do not follow Watch as I select the keyboard. 

Note the corner selector indicators. Now when I move the keyboard object the circles, don’t follow. Let me go ahead and undo that So we have them back to the right location and now I’m going to use something called the Lasso effect. You’ll use my mouth and select all three objects the two circles and the keyboard. 

They’re all selected as you can see the individual selection items around each object and now I’m going to do this special command Ctrl G and it grew some as a single object. When I move them around all three objects move around. Now to be able to undo that or to ungroup, we’re going to use the command called Control Shift G. 

And now all three objects are independent again. We can click and move them as individual items. Our next shortcut will let us increase or decrease the viewing size of our page. And what we’ll do is we’ll go into the specific location that we want to change the view and we’re going to find that most modern mouses have a middle scroll wheel and what you do is you hold down the control key and you can spin it up or down to increase or decrease the viewing zoom. 

This works in the standard area on the right side. It also works in your slide preview on the left side down into your slide sorter view, you’ll also work here. So those three spots will let To increase and decrease the zoom by holding down the control key and by rolling the middle mouse roll wheel up and back for zooming. 

Here’s a fix for an annoying problem often when you’re inserting lines as objects inside. PowerPoint getting them just perfectly aligned as horizontal or vertical or even a 45-degree angle when using a free-form mouse is almost impossible. But if you hold down the shift key and you then insert the lines you’re going to be able to have it staying within rails. 

As you insert your objects. Let’s click on insert we’re going to go over to shapes and choose a line and now once I do that. I can start a point hold down my shift key and when I drag it to the right, you’ll see it’s perfectly inline compared to the line above. 

Let’s do that again. We’re going to insert I’m going to choose another arrow and this time I do the starting point and I hold down the shift key the now drag and make it perfectly up and down line, or if we do it again insert and we choose a line this time. 

If I draw it at a 45-degree angle when I hold even if my mouse is not perfectly falling along the line will follow that direction. There’s a bonus tip for moving objects perfectly up down or sideways with small incremental steps use only the keyboard look at the unconstrained the movement is when I just use the mouth. 

However, if I select the item and use my keyboard arrows, I can perfectly move the objects in a channel, which is the up down left and right keys. And now for our last shortcut resizing objects around a central point typically when you go in and resize an object it grows but it does not stay in the right spot watch when we hit the glasses. 

I’m gonna resize this and it’s just making it grow towards the bottom and to the left not the original location, but what if we want to resize it and have it keep centered on a point in this case here all I need to do. Hold down the control key as I grab one of the corners to resize the object, it will resize around the center point as opposed to just growing bigger. 

Plus some bonuses that you can use while editing PowerPoint if you want to download a free copy of this cheat sheet go to our website of power dash up dot training or look for the links in the details below. Please use the bottom right subscribe red button icon to subscribe to power up training subscriptions help greatly to build our channel if you found this helpful to like this video likes encourages me to make more free videos for you. 

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